Dear Member of Parliament - an open letter ...

Dear Member of Parliament,

I am writing to complain because I am a taxpayer and my life is getting harder and less enjoyable and less free as time goes by. My disposable income falls year by year. Society is falling into disorder. Criminals are getting away with murder (literally) and persistent wrongdoers are re-offending without any real sanctions being taken against them. We are drowning in a tide of bullshit, spin and excessive regulation without any discernible benefits being gained in exchange. Taxes go up and up and yet services decline in Health, Education, Justice, Welfare, Public Transport and Policing. In short, all the things that help maintain a citizen’s way of life and safeguard his freedom are in decline.

Who has presided over this decline? It is our elected representatives. It is YOU, our members of parliament. I for one, and many others like me, I feel sure, are no longer prepared to continue to have our historic freedoms reduced whilst simultaneously having our purses pillaged by our arrogant and privileged politicians. My conclusion and the obvious answer must be that it is now time for Political Reform, root and branch. You will find a prototype manifesto near the end of this complaint.

As sadly only a few of you will be aware, the first great reform and birth of the modern parliament was the English civil war. King Charles the First started levying petty and vexatious taxes without the consent of Parliament. The War established that taxes were not to be levied without the consent of the taxpayer through Parliament. That theme was carried forward by the American War of Independence in which the slogan became "No taxation without representation". It sought to establish that no taxes should be collected in the American colonies unless with the consent of the colonists. You and the current Parliament have departed so far from that principle of consent that when there was widespread protest against the extortionate duty on motor fuels, the Prime Minister had the arrogance to call the protests undemocratic.

The present Parliament is no better than Charles the First. It continuously introduces new taxes in all their guises. These are variously inheritance tax, tax on savings, tax as national insurance, tax as reduced allowances, tax on pensions, tax as V.A.T., tax as speeding and parking fines, tax as fuel tax, tax as licence and passport fees, tax as green tax, tax as congestion charge, tax as road fund, tax as T.V. licence and tax as crossing or motorway tolls. That list is by no means complete but it perfectly illustrates the tax-greed of a wastrel Parliament. Pitt the younger's income tax was to be a temporary measure and was considered to be sufficient then to cover the expense of running both the government and the then anticipated war. In those days the traditional taxes on trade plus a half per cent rate of personal tax were enough to run everything plus a war. Nowadays those traditional taxes plus personal income tax of twenty per cent and all the new invented taxes which leech at our cost of living are apparently not enough to run a second rate country. Pitt was running an empire on a half a per cent tax rate and a small population tax base. Why can't you run a small country with money left over when your tax rate is 20 per cent, the population tax base is huge, and you have created hundreds of new taxes? The answer is obvious. If a mountain of taxes is still not enough then our taxes are being wasted. This means they are being recklessly squandered by being spent on the wrong things.

In this context, waste means spending money on projects which deplete the wealth of the country rather than increasing it. Abandon legal aid, quangos, management consultants, and translation fees. Build a state pension system which makes payments from the surplus generated by an invested fund rather than making payments directly from today's tax receipts. Make us self sufficient in energy by using our coal or building nuclear capacity. The cost of importing energy controlled by other people is bankrupting us and could potentially wreck our economy. Stop depleting the tax fund with the huge interest charges generated by excessive government borrowing. Emulate somewhere like France which exports energy has excellent public transport and motorways, good medical services and telecoms, and a lower cost of living as well. Begin by accepting that Britain has become second rate. Queues, waiting lists, congestion, high living costs, expensive energy, expensive public transport and low educational standards make Britain more and more like a failing communist regime day by day.

Governments no less than individuals need to live within their means. If I overspend my salary, I must stop spending. If I spend unwisely, I must explain to my dependents why they are cold and hungry. Their implied consent to my control of the budget does not relieve me of the responsibility to do my best for them. However the same controls do not yet apply to the Governments of this country and you show no responsibility to your taxpayers. If you run out of taxes; you don’t stop spending money. You simply raise taxes or invent new ones. If you spend unwisely or selfishly you are not obliged to explain to the electorate. This has to stop because the electorate has never given its consent, implied or otherwise to taxation without limit or to taxation without accountability. Taxes on the income remaining after income tax must be rolled back or abolished. If I pay income tax, V.A.T and National Insurance, I don’t expect to pay additional exorbitant fees for the passports, licences and documents required by government.

Small charges to cover the cost of materials are probably allowable but the salaries of civil servants and the department overheads belong to the government not the taxpayer. That’s what income tax is for – the costs of running a government. Taxpayers are also entitled to a detailed accounting of how tax revenues are spent. It is only with a statutory limit on tax raising and a detailed explanation of how taxes are spent that we can hope to steer government spending away from wasteful channels and prevent the pillaging of taxpayers pockets by a set of greedy, self-serving politicians who show no restraint with their pay and pensions and can conceive of no reason why they should not continue to do just as they like. If you give anyone the power of taxation they will abuse it as surely as you have done and now it is time for you too to be controlled just like Charles the First. It’s a basic truth of human nature that ‘Easy come is easy go” which is why those with the power of collecting taxes always and inevitably abuse it and eventually spend more of the money on themselves than is spent on the objectives the money was raised for. Tax money gets dispensed as freely as water and wasted in much the same careless way. As a safeguard the electorate must now vote on whether existing taxes can be raised or new ones created. In future a referendum must be held for each and every change in taxation. An over taxing, over spending Parliament is no longer fit to make that decision on our behalf. You have utterly betrayed the principles for which the English Civil War was fought.

Another abuse which profoundly annoys the taxpayer is the claim that M.P.s, civil servants, local government employees and those on benefits pay income tax. They do not. What they actually do, is to salve their consciences after raiding the tax fund by paying a rebate on the stolen gravy. An example will make this clear. When I pay income tax, the money increases the taxation fund. When you pay income tax, you first reduce the taxation fund and then give some of it back as a rebate in the form of tax but the overall effect is still to reduce the tax fund. If you all took lower salaries but paid no tax the effect would be plain for all to see with no difference in outcome i.e. you don’t really pay tax at all. Real taxpayers are those who derive their income from a salary paid out of the proceeds of profit. If I ask for a pay rise, it can be legitimately refused because my employer is making insufficient profit to afford it. If a pay rise can be afforded then it is likely to be limited to the 3 per cent rate of inflation claimed by cheating government figures which exclude the major household expenses. The rising costs of council tax, mortgage, fuel bills and other household expenses which are slowly making me poorer will be dishonestly ignored in the equation of working out what pay rises I need just to stand still. You on the other hand vote yourself a pay rise above inflation whenever you like. If I survive impoverished to retirement I will find that my pension has already been reduced by a conversion to a ‘money-purchase’ basis rather than a ‘final salary’ method because of Parliamentary interference. Tax on pension funds and the need for companies to hold loose cash sufficient to guarantee future payments has made final salary schemes for real taxpayers impossible to fund. By contrast M.P.s routinely vote themselves pay rises greater than 3 per cent and their final salary pension schemes are guaranteed by the taxation fund and indexed against inflation to boot. So let’s sum up. You can get a pay rise and increase in pension benefits whenever you like by dipping into the tax fund whilst I can only get what’ the economic situation allows and only to the extent suggested by untruthful government figures. You all have superior pensions with inflation proofing and you retire two years earlier than the rest of us during a period when you have presided over the total loss of pensions for some taxpayers and a substantial reduction in retirement benefits for most others. The difference in retirement ages and retirement benefits for public servants and those paying tax is an intolerable scandal and illustrates perfectly the hypocrisy of M.P.s. You are robbing the taxpayer blind whilst greedily feathering your own nests.

Come on you socialists, isn’t this theft by the non-contributors from those who do contribute? Isn’t this exploitation by the bosses (M.P.s) of the workers (taxpayers)? “Animal Farm” ought to be compulsory reading for all M.P.s. in which the taxpayer, that faithful workhorse, is denied a retirement and weakened so much by extended working that he eventually has to be sent to the knackers yard and his body sold for the profit of the pigs that control the farm. If you doubt my premise that you are the now the owners of Animal Farm or that you have betrayed the struggle fought by your predecessors against Charles the First then ask yourselves this :-
"Why did only 30 per cent of the population vote in recent elections?"
"Why do 1 in ten Britons live abroad?"
Of course, I am going to tell you the answer. It’s because politicians constantly make our lives harder by continuing to take more and more of our income in tax whilst simultaneously wasting more and more of the tax fund on sacred cows and poorly thought out projects and ideas. The outcome is a society which does not improve coupled with a life which gets more difficult to pursue because it demands increasing effort for diminishing rewards. It is a Politician’s job to make life better or if that cannot be done then at least to prevent it getting any worse. If you do not at least achieve that, then you become a burden on people’s lives. Why vote for different political flavours of the same general and increasing burden? The only thing that is ever changed by my vote is the flavour of the rhetoric and bullshit that gets delivered with my burden. Please demonstrate why my vote is a privilege and a duty when I get a larger burden and increasing amounts of drivel and spin each time I vote. If you don’t believe me – then ask the ordinary people of Ecuador. Voting is compulsory there but they routinely spoil their votes by voting for “None of the above”. Politicians in Ecuador are a class set apart who routinely award themselves pay-rises or debate the preservation of their privileges yet they have done nothing substantive to reduce the poverty suffered by the majority of the population they allegedly represent for the last 50 years. Of course, we are not yet Ecuador, but given your heads, I am sure you can reduce Britain to the status of a Third World country in record-breaking time.

I regret to say that even given that illustration, my expectation is that most of you will indignantly miss the point because nobody likes to be told that they have their noses in the feeding trough. You will only see that Britain and Ecuador are not the same and then immediately assert that my argument is wrong because of it. The real point is that you have become a ‘class set apart’ preoccupied with yourselves, whilst ignoring the wishes and the welfare of the contributing electorate who pay your wages.

Let me now turn to another abuse of power – the use of taxation for social engineering. It originates from the socialist dogma which holds that wealth ought to be distributed fairly. This is a high-minded ideal and always popular as long as it means that we are the recipients of money taken with moral justification from someone else. In practice it simply means that wealth is taken from those who have earned it and given indiscriminately to those who have not. It is the politics of envy and has learnt nothing from the object lesson of the collective farms of Stalinist Russia. Money or barter is the product and profit of labour but if having laboured, that product is taken from you and given to someone who has not worked as hard or even worked at all then you rapidly become disinclined to work.

That is a basic fact of human nature. Self interest motivates us all and is the driving force behind the will to work. No intelligent person does work for nothing. Even then, this destruction of the work ethic is still not as terminal as being unable to work because all the food you worked to grow has been taken from you and you are now starving. This was the annihilation of the property owning land working class in favour of the industrial working class by transferring the product of one class into the hands of another without restraint or compassion. This attitude echoes today in the Labour Party’s preference for Town over Countryside and the preference shown to the industrial North over the property owning South in the matter of Council Tax subsidy and benefits.. Why has Council Tax increased more in the South than in the North? Why does Council Tax in the South and West go up year on year by rates between 7% and 14% which are well above official inflation? Can it be that more of the Tax cake is being distributed to Councils in the North on the basis that they have fewer property owning taxpayers with which to pay for services? It is difficult to see how bankrupting a Southerner whose taxes would otherwise be helping a Northener is a fiscal gain for either. Bankrupting a Pensioner in the South in order to support a family of four on income support in the North is part of a wider policy war of envy and meanness.

I thought tax was to be distributed fairly according to need. It is an axiom of modern democracy that the citizen should be prepared to see some of their tax go to those less well off than themselves but I wonder whether Politicians can see the eventual outcome of that policy if it is carried out without the safeguard of a limitation. Already in this country, a diminishing number of taxpayers are supporting freeloaders like MPs and an increasing number of work-shy benefit takers. England is the unmarried-mother capital of Europe with the highest rate of teenage pregnancy on the continent but none of you can understand why. It’s perfectly simple. If you give job seekers allowance to out of work teenage girls it eventually comes to an end. However if that teenage girl conceives a child she will become entitled to income support for as long as required. The more children she has the greater the support. Being the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe is less a matter of morality or social justice than of basic economics. Unmarried teenage mothers may be poorly educated but they’re not stupid. If job-seeker’s allowance did not terminate they would not bother with babies to get income support. There would be no need. Why don’t you Socialist bleeding hearts try framing benefit rules which take account of the logic of human behaviour rather than the holy cow of giving to the needy without asking how they deviously managed to become so needy?

It is perfectly proper to support people with children if those people lose their jobs. It is less certain whether people who have more children than their wages can afford should be subsidised by the state with tax credits unless that same indulgence is extended to absolutely everyone. Please explain how giving generous support to unmarried mothers and unemployed people with large families is going to increase the tax generated central fund when the birth rate amongst the tax paying class is falling. If you get to a situation where there are more dependents than taxpayers, bankruptcy for all will be the result. Heed the warning signs. Despite the hike in the number of taxes, the tax fund is being dished out faster than it is being topped up.

Take a lesson from France – they’re waking up and offering incentives to middle-class professional women to have more children. Clearly they are hoping to generate children that will become taxpayers rather than dependents on the state. The other objective which dare not speak its name is that the middle classes are better behaved and less inclined to crime so the ethos and wealth of French society is likely to improve as well.

Unfortunately there seems no end to this culture of worshipping the benefit takers at the cost of the taxpayer. M.P.s on the left particularly and many now of those on the right (cowed by Political correctness) are proclaiming that there should be equal opportunity for all in a manner which suggests that it does not yet exist. It’s simply not true. Almost free education for all has been around for 100 years but the lazy and disinterested are not taking advantage of it. The so called “Working Class” so beloved of socialist politicians is a class of people who have never believed that Education is a necessity. Their children were going to work in manual trades and occupations and therefore did not need the standard of education required by the despised ‘white collar’ Office worker. That attitude is reflected in the high absentee rates from school amongst children of these parents. These are the same Parents who can afford to take their children out of school for holidays and mid-week shopping trips whilst apparently being ‘failed’ by the education system. Short of sense but apparently not short of money. In school these children suffer academically because of having missed lessons and because of the Working Class culture of making fun of the class room swots. Anyone who does well is looked down upon as a weakling and a teacher’s pet and is highly likely to be bullied as well. All this is the consequence of the twisted Working Class idea that physical labour is ‘manly’ and ‘of the people’ whilst office work is for bosses and physical weaklings. Those bosses are of course oppressive tyrants growing rich on the sweat of the working man’s brow. What rubbish! Clerks with soft white hands sitting in offices generate the greatest part of this Country’s wealth through Invisible earnings and other financial services. The manual labour of Manufacturing Industry has been automated away and has declined through no fault of the Middle Class. Global Economics is the cause and the Working Class needs to get itself educated and into offices where it can earn a living instead of whining about the privileges, education and access to services enjoyed by the children of parents who were made to go to school, made to do homework, made to pass exams. They have earned those privileges through effort and not demanded them for free as an entitlement of equality of opportunity. The opportunity was equal but not everybody made the effort or bothered to understand the importance of making the sustained effort needed to take advantage of it.

For the socialists amongst you let me tell you a true story that illustrates for me the difference in effort and the use of money between Middle-Class taxpayers and the Working-Class. When colour televisions were first appearing on the market they were very expensive and so relatively rare. A teacher in a poor district of some shire town asked how many children had a colour TV at home. To her surprise over half the class indicated that they had. An even more surprising observation was that most of the families who had a colour television were also receiving free school dinners. Taxpayers were choosing to take a school meal and to pay for it rather than making their children skip lunch in favour of being able to buy a colour television. Taxpayers were faced with making a choice between duty and pleasure. No such dilemma faces those on benefits. It’s a sad reflection on how a benefit culture reduces the need to exercise self restraint but it’s a great gravy train for its allegedly underprivileged Working Class beneficiaries who can please themselves constantly whilst the rest of us have to make less selfish choices.

As a taxpayer, I am sick of hearing left-wing politicians and the appeasers from the right, insincerely prating about the need to help hard working families. They of course mean Working Class families and not taxpayers struggling to pay bills and educate their children. They ignore the fact that their Working Class are sitting at home on income support watching plasma TVs, selling drugs or breaking into taxpayer’s homes whilst their owners are at work. In the daytime and evening kids from homes with working class values roam the streets vandalizing cars and property. This Teenage delinquency is a by product of those made uncaring and hopeless by lack of education and made undisciplined by lack of parental control. It is mainly the children of parents freed from social and fiscal responsibility by income support or state subsidy who generate costs to the Police, the Courts, Social Services and the Probation Service. In contrast the children of taxpayers with Middle-Class values are at school during the day and are quietly at home doing homework or more constructive activities during most evenings. A middle class taxpayer and his children cost the country nothing in extras and the taxpayer contributes hugely to the tax fund. Families with Working-Class attitudes deplete the central tax fund and generate extra costs in Policing and Welfare. We the taxpayers are the givers. They the so called Working Class are the takers. We are the actual Working Class – not them. How are we taxpayers taking advantage or receiving more in opportunity than them?

And what has been the outcome of this policy of transferring wealth from the earners to the dependents? Let me tell you. You have created an ill educated ‘popular’ culture of moral indiscipline and envy in which serious crime is decreasingly punished and in which the relatively law-abiding can be fined more and more for relatively trivial matters like improper parking or small excesses of the speed limit. Of course, fines are also levied for drunkenness and anti-social behaviour and yet sixty per cent of fines go uncollected by Courts. Guess who the defaulters are. I bet it’s not the mostly law abiding taxpayers. They can be traced to home or office by tax code and pay-slip, held there by responsibilities which make them easy to find. The less responsible and less law abiding can give an address and then disappear before the bailiff calls whilst those on benefits can evade the inconvenience of a fine by offering to pay 50 pence a week – a sum hardly worth the cost of collecting. The state does not pursue defaulters with enough energy or resources. As a result minor wrongdoing goes unpunished again and again. Rules that go unenforced quickly become ineffective but the lost revenue is easily replaced by raising the values of the fines you do manage to collect. It’s easier to steal more money from the mainly law-abiding than to bear the costs of enforcement against those who ignore the rules. Cue here the CSA and its successor. Yet again middle class tax-paying divorced men will be robbed blind while the absentee fathers who made us the pregnancy capital of Europe will run free. This is the triumph of accountancy over accountability. This is what we mean by moral turpitude. This is to do the wrong things because they’re easier and therefore cheaper rather than doing the more difficult things which you know ought to be done.

Crime and Punishment is another area where the Public has been cheated by Parliament. You are all no doubt proud that you have consistently voted against the death penalty. Your promise in return has always been that Life Imprisonment could safely be substituted as an adequate deterrent because a whole life in Prison would be worse for a killer than termination by hanging. It wasn’t long before you back-pedalled and reneged on your promises. The current tariff for murder seems to be 12 years which translates with remission to 6 years. Just think. A tax-maddened citizen aged 18 could murder seven politicians on separate occasions and still be out of prison in time for retirement. How is 12 years with remission ever a Life sentence? It takes a minimum of 18 years to grow a voter so how can it be right to let a murder conviction carry less than 18 years served in prison? By the way that means in your skew-arsed terms that the actual sentence needs to be 36 years because of the 50% remission a killer gets if he wears a suit and says sorry. Even then, I am not sure that a Life sentence shouldn’t mean exactly what it says. It should mean imprisonment for the whole of Life. Murder is a serious business but you have reduced it to the status of a midemeanour.

This reduction of murder sentencing to a short stint in Prison is yet another by-product of Socialist thinking which holds that Deprivation causes Crime. In this cosy ideal of envious thinking it is held that victims must expect no protection because it’s criminal of them to have money and possessions which attract well meaning deprived people who are almost entitled to relieve them of their possessions with violence. It’s some luck to live in a lawless area. It’s some privilege to find no shops in the area because crime makes shop-keeping uneconomic or dangerous. I say Crime causes Deprivation. There are no deprived areas in this country – only lawless, undisciplined areas. If you fix the lawlessness the discipline will improve, and crime will reduce. Social welfare will not be wasted on first-aid for drugs and crime and the whole area will improve once people can acquire and own possessions which aren’t constantly stolen and destroyed by those who break the law. This, by the way, includes State possessions like schools, often a target for arson in lawless areas.

Motorists with driving bans, driving untaxed, uninsured or stolen vehicles are often in the news killing or injuring pedestrians and other drivers. They’re in the news because of the aggravating nature of their offences. This can be driving while banned, driving at high speed amongst a dense pedestrian traffic, or driving under the ‘influence’. Killing with a car is as fatal as killing with a knife. But because driving crimes are classified as traffic offences the penalties handed out for murder or bodily harm by drivers are derisory. A recent example will make this clear. A banned driver, who had been disqualified 11 times, knocked down and killed a schoolboy hours after smoking heroin. The driver was on licence and his punishment was an 8 year sentence (4 years with remission). Why does it take 10 attempts to do any enforcement and why is the sanction finally applied so very feeble? Don’t you feel ashamed that you have still not done anything about timely and effective sanction against this species of criminal? I expect that probably too many lawyers are arguing that it’s not a big problem and is most easily solved by asking pedestrians and legitimate drivers to be more careful. The flouting of driving bans by criminal motorists perfectly illustrates the disrepute into which laws have fallen through not being enforced effectively. To respect a driving ban is an act of trust which if betrayed should be followed by imprisonment for the full period of the ban. No exceptions. If a fourteen year old gets a five year driving ban and breaks it, he or she goes to prison for five years with no shilly shallying. The untrustworthy simply can’t drive whilst in Prison.

Of course taxpayers know that this won’t happen. Why not? Apparently, Parliament does not believe in Prison. Not enough prisons have been built and that situation looks set to continue.
The Howard Trust for Penal reform bleats that prison is used too much. The appeasers say that criminals are not responsible for their crimes because they’re caused by factors outside their control. Behavioural dieticians complain that food additives cause criminality. The wets (including the Lord Chancellor) simply believe that being nicer to criminals makes it probable they will behave better in future. None of these ‘drippy’ factions however have an answer when it comes to protecting a taxpayer’s dependents from murder, rape, mugging, bullying and anti-social behaviour. One hundred murders and one hundred rapes have been committed by repeat offenders released on licence during the last two years.

It’s difficult for the ordinary person to find a counter argument to the tide of skilled bullshit employed in making excuses for criminality but let’s try. Common sense and observation can tell us that criminals are probably made and not born except in rare cases. The main cause is probably poor parenting. Two danger indicators are poor discipline and a low standard of education. If discipline and education are absent from a child’s upbringing, then self-control and job-prospects are also highly likely to be absent later on. Having insufficient education to acquire a reasonably paid job is leaves only a choice between benefits or crime. A lack of self control makes the discipline of keeping a job difficult and the probability of anti-social behaviour high. A lack of Education makes for a narrow outlook on life and an intolerance of others. How many of us have seen other people’s young children running out of control screaming, shouting and barging around a restaurant or holiday resort. The parents will not control them and frequently threaten others who ask that they be controlled. These will be the same parents who complain later on to social services or the police that they cannot control their teenagers. Trying to exert control over a thirteen year old that has been unrestrained and rarely given a ‘No’ during the preceding twelve years can only expect failure as an outcome. Of course, not all unruly teenagers become criminals but children who will not account to their parents for where they have been, what they have been doing and with whom they have been associating, must self evidently be vulnerable to criminal enticement from both predators and peers. Letting a child do what it wants and giving it whatever it wants is not an act of love. It is an act of character destruction which may reap a whirlwind later on. The Working Class has always put its children on a pedestal and has always critiscised the Middle Class for being strict with its children and sending them away to school. I know which class of children I think is good for Society. I think it is the well educated, well disciplined ones. Criminals are not a different species of human. They are just a group, who has decided that they will not obey some or all of society’s rules. They make a choice that they will do what they want to the degree that they choose despite the knowledge that Society forbids it. That makes its own excitement and is not a difficult choice to make when the sanctions are too few and utterly ineffectual. Why do you reformers think that more offender education is the answer? It’s already too late. The discipline of education and obedience to rules has already been rejected at an earlier stage of life. Crime is more exciting and less effort than working all day in an office and pro-rata probably earns more per hour than most office jobs. Why lord Chancellor do you think that being gentle with criminals is going to make them more likely to choose the less exciting and more difficult task of working for a living?

The answer of course is that it won’t and it never will. Restriction and close supervision i.e. enforcement is the answer to repeat offending. All you appeasers share a common trait. You see things as you would like them to be and not as they are. You ignore Machiavelli’s advice whilst criminals embrace it. The only thing that checks criminality is that dreaded idea that appeasers constantly ridicule. That idea is variously sanction or retribution or punishment. These variations on the theme of sanction may be uncomfortable to you but to normal people it indicates that most people expect to pay a price or receive a bill for the self indulgences they have enjoyed. This is a rule of Life and applies to criminals and non-criminals alike and both classes of person understand it at brain-stem level. Nobody can stop another person doing what they want but we can make the bill so high that the pleasure is spoilt by the price. We accept that this does not always halt extreme or unpleasant forms of gratification but surely any fool can see that it must discourage it. Prison can be used to make the price of self indulgence too high or to remove the opportunity for future gratification from an offender. Criminals openly declare that they see kindness only as weakness. Why then are you constantly reducing sentences, releasing prisoners on licence (100 murders & 100 rapes in two years) or releasing prisoners unsupervised to bail hostels? The answer is simple. You do not believe in prison and so not enough have been built. This also explains the appeasers’ agonized wringing of hands over Britain having the highest prison population in Europe. Of course we have. We haven’t built any substantive Prison space for decades so we’re overcrowded and we’ve got more offenders than other more law-abiding countries because of constant appeasement. Shorter sentences mean less inconvenience to criminals and consequently a reduced check on the growth of criminality. Longer sentences discourage crime and prisons would eventually be less full if crime was discouraged. So let us have no more bullshit. If we’ve got the highest prison population in Europe then you the Politicians, the Parole Board and the Probation service all helped build it. Accept the responsibility and do something about it. Releasing more and more serious offenders on licence or discounting sentences to avoid overcrowding is not an answer acceptable to people with common sense. It’s a criminal act by Politicians and Politicians should be punished for it. Build more prisons now or decimate the prison population by ballot. Criminals love excitement and admire bad behaviour in others. A badly behaved State practicing decimation could help relieve the tedium of prison and release 10 per cent of the space leaving you enough time to get the building program started. It would probably also reduce all sorts of imprisonable offending whilst criminals pondered the probability of being randomly murdered in Prison by a lunatic State driven insane by no longer being able to ignore the wishes of its electorate.

As to why sentencing and punishment is such a farce, the answer is simple. There are too many members of the legal profession serving as MPs in Parliament. The adversarial quality of lawyers which allows them to argue that black is white and white is black whenever occasion demands has turned the clear determination of right and wrong into a grey mush in which the truth is constantly ruled inadmissible on a technicality or in which the truth is suppressed in case it prejudices a criminal’s rights or lets the electorate know what’s going on. In court or in Parliament it makes no difference – no lawyer should ever be allowed to become a politician and vice-versa. Justice and Truth are argued out of existence by technical discussion and political spin whenever a politician or a lawyer is present. Eleven disqualifications, released on licence, taking heroin, child murder by car and only 4 years in prison tells us all we need to know about Justice and Law enforcement in this country. M.P.s and the Legal Profession are the sole cause of that utter betrayal of the citizen’s right to protection from the state.

This connection between Parliament and the Legal Profession makes for a powerful political lobby. It no doubt explains why millionaire barristers can get fat on bills paid through legal aid and charged to the tax fund whilst ordinary taxpayers cannot afford to go to law. Everybody is so afraid of the huge costs of being taken to court and the unpredictability of outcomes that corporate and public life has invented hundreds of rules to guard against being sued and liability insurance premiums are unaffordable except by millionaires. That everybody is so afraid of lawyers is a clear pointer to why Justice, common sense and clear outcomes have been replaced in society by a climate of litigation and uncertainty designed with the sole object of directing more and more wealth into the pockets of the legal profession. Inaccessible Justice, higher costs, more rules, and more uncertainty are the outcome of this cosy relationship between the legal profession and parliament. The climate of rules based on fear of litigation has led to an increasing loss of those minor freedoms which were once so enjoyable. No ice-slides in the playground or conkers not allowed in case we hurt ourselves. This is a Litigation paradise for ambulance-chasers. This is yet another decline in the quality of Life for which MPs and the Legal Profession are solely responsible.

Let us now discuss our increasing loss of liberty. Liberty is not hard to define. It is the freedom to live life with as few rules and as little interference as possible. Except for anarchists, most of us accept that there must be some rules to prevent one person’s liberty infringing on that of another. The Declaration of Independence by the United States is a reasonable model of such a codex of acceptable and limited rules by which citizens may get along with one another. However, in the UK, that model is being increasingly departed from by a proliferation of new rules purely for the benefit of the State. Some are designed to put the citizen under even more scrutiny and some are designed to make good the failure to enforce other less intrusive rules already in existence.

The rules which put us under more scrutiny share one thing in common which is that they presume us to be guilty rather than innocent. That is already endangering us all. People are now routinely fighting to prove themselves innocent because of mistakes by Police, government agencies, and utility companies. Mistaken identity and other forms of inaccurate recording cause these agencies to state with absolute power and absolute certainty that we have committed some crime and yet how often have we seen that after a long and difficult struggle, we eventually get proved innocent. The presumption of innocence has been overturned by the sweeping powers you have given to these agencies. Our bank accounts may be examined in case we are tax dodging or money laundering. Our DNA may be obtained without conviction for a crime just in case we may become guilty of future wrong-doing. Our communal e-mails and mobile phones are routinely trawled by the police without the need for individual court orders in case their ‘trawling’ reveals us to be talking to undesirables. Shortly we are to be compelled to hold identity cards containing our biometric data. Our images are constantly captured on video in the most videoed nation in the world. Why? What for? It’s because you don’t catch the real criminals and even if you do you don’t keep them in Prison. Gangland bosses, the captains and lieutenants of crime and illegal immigrants all routinely evade sentencing and punishment, and supervision but you can always wrongly prosecute a well monitored tax paying citizen for some minor infringement or other.

You really should read George Orwell’s “1984”. That’s a surveillance State in which everyone is guilty of something and that’s the State we’re galloping towards. If you had read 1984, we wouldn’t now be sleepwalking into the oblivion of total State control. As soon as you make a rule allowing police to embed cameras in domestic digital televisions your dream will come true. Maximum supervision will be achieved at minimal cost. Guilt or innocence will no longer be an issue. A proper Police State at last – all courtesy of those guardians of collectivist ideology, our Members of Parliament.

The new intrusive rules engendered by the failure to enforce previous ones are best illustrated by the proposal to allow roadside fingerprinting. This is an abusive attempt to identify people who are unknown to the State because our border checks were not enforced when the anonymous person entered the country. It is an annoyance and an inconvenience to me that I may be fingerprinted at the roadside. The argument is not whether I have anything to hide and is not that I have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide. The argument is why should I be inconvenienced at all? Why should a citizen’s freedom be reduced by blanket restrictions invented only to compensate for a failure to apply control to the specific cause of a problem? Stop aliens entering the country by policing our borders effectively and stop criminals roaming on licence by keeping them in Prison. Stop them for being guilty rather than stopping me in case I’m not. You don’t need to stop me at all if you stop them effectively.

Too many rules signal a failure to think clearly. A mountain of rules is worse than none if the ones you do have are not enforced. One good rule properly enforced is worth ten bad ones. Ten rules where one would do is a loss of liberty by any yardstick of measurement. Too many rules represent rules being made because they can be rather than because they should be and again represents an unwillingness to think clearly. Yet again our M.P.s have failed us and continue to fail us. This Parliament and its recent predecessors have passed more laws than ever before and raised more taxes than ever before with worse results than ever before.

Imagine the Hypothetical Manifesto of the presently unformed “Tax Reform and Freedom Party”

1) All MPS to earn no more than the national average wage and to work a 40 hour week.
2) All MPS to receive a state pension and retirement age equivalent to the national average.
3) All MPs to receive only five weeks holiday a year and loss of salary if absent without leave.
4) No MP to hold any outside commercial interest or occupation or to be sponsored by any person or organization.
5) No police protection for MPs so that they share the public’s experience of crime and disorder, roving criminals and absent policemen.
6) The Parliamentary Whip to be made illegal so that voting according to conscience is made possible.
7) No public funding for political parties because they cannot learn to live within their means already. Political funding is another dip into taxpayer’s pockets. M.P.s cost us far too much already
8) Inheritance tax, tax on Pensions, and tax on moving house to be abolished.
9) Parliament to lose the right to raise taxes except with the consent of the electorate via referendum.
10) Local Government to lose the ability to impose fines without legislation.
11) Local Council Tax in any format or by any name to be absolutely abolished. Local government to be funded entirely from national income.
12) Water, street- lighting, rubbish collection, Police, Fire and Ambulance to be locally free of charge to all citizens by being paid from national taxation rather than Council Tax.
13) Re-Nationalise the Water Companies to bring them into Public control. It’s safer and cheaper. No more water restrictions. Build desalination units and reservoirs and stop leaks.
14) De-localisation of health facilities to regional centres to be halted. Emergencies and illnesses occur everywhere – not just in major town centres.
15) De-localisation of Police concentrations to regional centres to be halted. Crime and disorder fills the space left by a retreating police presence. Police budgets to be tripled and police forces brought up to proper strength.
16) No more taxes on motor fuel or the use of a motor car. A car is the only means of getting to work for those who cannot work locally or catch a train or bus and will continue to be so until Public Transport is radically improved by proper funding.
17) Identity cards to be dropped. Funding for the anti-terrorist branch to be increased to the same level as that of the army and not to remain at a lower level than the funding allocated to DEFRA. If we are fighting a war against terrorism; let’s fight it with a war budget and not with my biometric details.
18) Abolition of speed cameras and radar guns except outside schools, near homes for the aged, near pedestrian crossings and in residential areas. The fines raised to be paid into Accident Victim support funds rather than to Councils or the Police force. This will stop cameras being used for revenue generation.
19) Civil rights of criminals to be suspended during the commission of a crime for which the criminal is subsequently convicted so that burglars injured by householders have no right to sue the householder. Ditto citizen’s arrests made by members of the public. Any compensation to convicted criminals to be absolutely prohibited under any circumstances. Forfeiture of rights to be a consequence of conviction.
20) More prisons to be built and police numbers to be raised to the proper ratio per 1000 citizens. The Probation Service and Parole Board to be abolished and Remission of sentences reduced to a maximum of 10 per cent. If prisoners misbehave because of low remission, introduce summary execution for any prisoner causing death or injury to Prison officers or other inmates and extend sentences exponentially for lesser transgressions.
21) Convert the Justice system to the Continental Model of examining magistrates so as to exclude the adversarial method of determining guilt which is little better than trial by combat. Revoke all and any privileges of the Legal profession which stand between the citizen and his right to make a case in a high Court of Justice. Abolish the Bar and barristers – the expense is bankrupting the legal system and making Justice too expensive to obtain.
22) The Parliament Act to be abolished so that the House of Lords can keep a check on the stupidities of the Commons.
23) Quangos and Ombudsman and similar to be abolished .so that no non elected body can make unchallengeable rulings which affect the lives of the electorate. The right of redress to be placed back into a court of Justice (Not of Law). Successful pleadings to be free. Frivolous or unwarranted pleadings to be billable with charges suspended pending appeal.
24) Withdrawal from the European Union until that organization is governed by its parliament rather than a set of unelected commissioners.
25) The income from taxation to be audited annually by a group of non governmental tax payers with any irregularities or discrepancies in spending to cause an immediate general election and police investigation.

It is my hope in writing to you that you will be persuaded to put your house in order voluntarily before opinions swing too far. But if you do not, taxpayers might have to consider more co-ercive measures. You would do well to remember that the Identity Cards you plan for us are a double edged sword. Your plan, no doubt is to use them for further revenue gathering enforcement against taxpayers and for further intrusion into the private details of taxpayers lives. You should however remember that in Nazi Germany’s hands, identity cards were used to segregate Jews and non-Jews and once segregated, to persecute them. Just imagine how easy it would become to victimise and eradicate any part of the population if the data became available to some malign future government of this country. Of course, you do not see any such danger because you imagine that you will continue to govern ad nauseam. However the growth of the British National Party should give you pause for thought. The more that working taxpayers become angered by the Weimar Republic you are building the more likely a burst of extremism becomes. It becomes likely because the only people that identity cards actually inconvenience and endanger are law-abiding taxpayers. Criminals and aliens will forge them and populate their forgeries with data stolen from legitimate citizens as has always been done with ration books, passports, security passes, benefit books and credit cards. Identity fraud is a growing problem. What prevents you from understanding that the same will be done with Identity cards? A well funded security service would be a better answer. Perhaps your privilege sodden minds could be focused more on the logic of the issue if identity cards were to be employed as a means of separating the population into Politicians and non-Politicians. We could begin by making you wear Gravy-Train badges, and by giving your subsidised homes and offices to far more deserving citizens. We could bar you from holding any office of state and forbid intermarriage or association between you and non-politicians in order to maintain the ethical purity of our nation. Hooray. Just imagine what fun we could have with a second Wahnsee conference in which we discussed the resettlement of Politicians to the Falkland Islands. “Witless debate macht Frei” It would only be a short and dangerous step on from there to discussing transport arrangements and the provision of showers and crematoria.

If you do not stop abusing the people you represent, will you really expect to be treated with respect by the people we might elect to get rid of you?

Yours Faithfully,

Deprived, over-regulated, taxpaying citizen.